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2008 25: 103Theory Culture SocietyEd Cohen

A Body Worth Having? : Or, A System of Natural Governance

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A Body Worth Having?Or, A System of Natural Governance

Ed Cohen

Is the body the vessel which holds the true self locked within it? Is the skinthe frontier between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’? What in man is the capsule, andwhat the encapsulated? (Norbert Elias, The History of Manners)

The Body is Not a Defensible BoundaryWhen John Locke famously avowed in The Second Treatise on Government[1689] that: ‘Every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body hasany right to but himself’ (II § 27), he established a philosophical axiom thataffirmed the rights of citizens. From the Lockean perspective – a perspec-tive which has profoundly informed much discussion about political andeconomic rights since then – we enter into the public domain as owners ofour bodies and the labor of those bodies and this property-in-ourselvescannot be taken from us without due process of law. Indeed, according toLocke, the right to own property itself derives from this fundamental propri-etary self relation: ‘though the things of nature are given in common, yetman, by being master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and theactions or labour of it, had still in himself the great foundation of property’(II § 44). In so far as they incorporate this Lockean perspective, our legaland economic notions of individualism and individual rights (such as theright to property) rest on the premise that as embodied persons we possessourselves.1 It seems a simple enough formula: to be a (legal) person meansto have a body.2 Starting from this proprietary premise, we derive the mostbasic concepts that organize our political and economic lives. For example,our prevailing notions of freedom, on the one hand, or wage labor, on theother, both owe their significance to Locke’s seminal formulation. Framingour most basic forms of social and personal engagement, these conceptssaturate our self-understanding about how we live, both as humans amongother humans and as organisms in the world. Indeed, the imaginary

■ Theory, Culture & Society 2008 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),Vol. 25(3): 103–129DOI: 10.1177/0263276408090660

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equivalence between ‘being a person’ and ‘having a body’ has long sincepassed over into our daily lives, so that ‘having a body’ now makes us knownto ourselves in very immediate and intimate ways.

Quite likely, this being/having a body formula feels familiar enough tomost of us who live within the ambit of Western political rationality, orindeed Western political ontology.3 Taking care of our bodies has becomethe cultural equivalent of maintaining our capital. The body is a kind ofproperty that we invest in – psychically and financially – because ‘it’ givesus back to ourselves. We can exercise ‘it’, we can liposuction ‘it’, we canwork ‘it’, we can neglect ‘it’, because ‘it’ is ours to control. Conversely,whatever we do, or do not do, with and to ‘it’ seems to tell us somethingprofoundly true about who we are. If our bodies are fit and ‘well defined’,we seem healthy, energetic and productive; if our bodies are under--exercised and overweight, we are self-loathing, lazy and depressed. But whatexactly do we mean when we say: ‘I have a body’? Who or what is this ‘I’that ‘has’ ‘a body’ anyway? And how and why does this ‘having’, this possess-ing, of ‘a body’ confer legal and psychological personhood on us? Does suchbodily possession necessarily define a mode of ‘self ownership’? Is distin-guishing between the notions of ‘being an organism’, or even ‘being alive’,and ‘having a body’ just a matter of semantics? Or are there pragmatic,bio-political consequences to the ways we construe our vitality and embodi-ment? Can thinking about ‘the body’ as a (or even, the) matter of ‘selfpossession’ tell us something interesting about how ‘personhood’ informs ourlives? After all, what is ‘the nature’ of ‘the body’, if it can be possessed insuch a manner? And does this proprietary way of thinking exhaust thepossibilities for how we can imagine what it means to be an organism, aperson, a citizen or a human?

Consider for a moment a rather different way of conceiving embodiedpersonhood: translating the worldview of her native people, the OkanaganFirst Nations (an indigenous people who claim descent from the lands ofwestern Canada now called British Columbia), for a non-native readership,Jeanette Armstrong, a member of the traditional council of the PentictonIndian band, lyrically describes the Okanagan understanding of ‘physicalself’ (one of the four ‘capacities of the self’).

Okanagans teach that the body is the Earth itself. Our flesh, our blood, andbones are Earth-body; in all cycles in which Earth moves, so does our body.We are everything that surrounds us, including the vast forces that we onlyglimpse. If we cannot continue as an individual life form, we dissipate backinto the larger self. Our body-mind is extremely knowledgeable in that way.As Okanagans we say the body is sacred. It is the core of our being, whichpermits the rest of the self to be. It is the great gift of our existence. Our wordfor body literally means ‘the land-dreaming capacity’. (1996: 463–4)

Armstrong’s translation of the Okanagan sense of ‘body’ emphasizes charac-teristics that diverge from the dominant Western understanding of ‘havinga body’. ‘Body’, for the Okanagan, derives from and participates in the being

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(and the well-being) of the planet; in this cosmological ontology we are,literally and materially, pieces of the earth. In Armstrong’s account, bodynames a ‘capacity’ not an object; thus, it evokes a set of potentialities thatendure only so long as they are viable, or perhaps ‘dreaming’. ‘Individual’refers neither to an intrinsic quality of personhood, nor to a way of being aperson, but rather specifies a ‘form’ of aliveness that is both contingent andtemporary. ‘Body’ then does not denominate a possession that we have, butrather embraces ‘the great gift of our existence’ which we receive – perhapswith gratitude – for a limited duration of time.

Lest you think that I am romantically appropriating the Okanaganworldview for my own purposes, let me assure you that this critical assess-ment does not emerge only from the non-modern domains shaped byindigenous personhood. It also appears, for example, within the consum-mately Western, high-tech provinces of contemporary bio-science. Theor-etical biologist Dorian Sagan has recently elaborated the politicalimplications arising from the recent bio-scientific perception that organismsevolve not just by competition and ‘survival of the fittest’ but also by cooper-ation and symbiosis. In this project, he draws on the germinal insights ofevolutionary biologist and bacteriologist Lynn Margulis, whose work hasradically recast the basic understanding of cellular life, affirming that allnucleated cells represent the successful fusion of two or more bacteriallineages (see Margulis, 1970, 1981; Margulis and Sagan, 1986, 1997, 2002).Sagan describes the multi-cellular organisms that arise from such bacterialcombinations as ‘chimeras’, and notes:

The human body is an architechtonic compilation of millions of agencies ofchimerical cells. [. . .] These cells themselves appear to represent the latter-day result, the fearful symmetry, of microbal communities so consolidated, sotightly organized, that they have been selected together, one for all and allfor one, as societies in the shape of organisms. [. . .] The body can no longerbe seen as single and unitary. It is a multiple, even if orchestrated by vicis-situdes and harmony over evolutionary time. We are all multiple beings. [. . .]The body is not one self but a fiction of a self built from a mass of interactingselves. A body’s capacities are literally the result of what it incorporates; theself is not only corporal but corporate. (1992: 368–70)

Here Sagan asks us to refigure the unit of analysis that we take as thefoundation of our self conceit. Drawing our attention to the biologicalcomplexity that multicellular organisms necessarily incorporate, he callsour attention to the ‘fiction’ that we invoke when we apprehend ‘the body’as a singularity, which seems to naturalize our status as individuals. Instead,he suggests that we disrupt this modern worldview and embrace a non-modern perspective, which he labels ‘medieval-microcosmic’, in order toaffirm a fundamentally different political ontology:

We are metametazoans, metazoans whose industrial pollutants, ecologicalimpact, and telecommunications have not only altered the shape of life on

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Earth but forced us to recognize the environment of life as a totality withshared destiny, as a single, integrated, sensitive, and sensing system. (1992:380)

Like Donna Haraway (1992) who affirms the ‘promise of monsters’ asoffering a critical ontology that de-stabilizes the anthro-centric hubris ofhuman agency, Sagan challenges our economic, epistemological, psycho-logical and political investments in the singularity of ‘the body’ in so far asit has come to serve as a metonym for a type of person who can be inter-pellated as a qualified subject. ‘The body’, figured as a kind of being thatcan be ‘had’ by those who live though the multiple agencies localized within‘it’, unconsciously and unwittingly gives shape to the forms of subjectivityand belonging that define the ambit of modernity. Moreover, it does so bysituating the modern way of being human that we call liberal personhoodwithin this bodily fiction as if this were its ‘natural’ home.

I begin my discussion of modern ‘liberal’ personhood with these two‘non-modern’ examples – of which there are obviously myriads – in orderto remind us that there is no necessity or inevitability behind our commit-ment to ‘having a body’ and its various sequels (including the presumptionthat ‘the worth’ of the body defines ‘the worth’ of the person, the logical andpolitical basis for biologized forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, xeno-phobia, class oppression, etc.). But even apart from these culturally ortheoretically distinct possibilities for conceiving human embodiment, thelogic which underlies the concept of ‘the body’ as a thing-to-be-possesseditself may no longer make complete sense. For, if we reflect for a momenton what we actually refer to when we say ‘the body’ or ‘my body’ – as in ‘mybody is totally out of shape’ or ‘I wish that my body looked like one of thosemodels in the magazines’ – we might find that, rather than manifesting athing-like substantiality, or well-defined appropriability, corporeal beingunfolds in time as a concatenation of bio-molecular transformations ofmatter and energy localized in space. This time-space localization formsboth what we call ‘a body’ and what we call ‘a life’. Moreover, such a ‘lifeform’ can only exist in contexts that sustain its aliveness, a context-dependence that disturbs any essential distinctions between ‘the body’ and‘the environment’.4 Hence, we might argue that our common understandingof ‘the body’ as both formally discrete and politically, socially and/orpsychologically fundamental poses something of a paradox: how do evanes-cent, contingent and continuous processes get construed as a separateand distinct ‘individual’?5 And why are we so invested in separation anddistinction anyway?

Obviously, such reflections on the context-dependent transitivity ofembodiment do not necessarily impugn the ‘body-as-property’ formula perse. In fact, as we will find below, it was precisely in order to encompasssuch incessant mutability that Locke founded his notion of ‘man’ soexplicitly on a transitory phenomenon that he called ‘the same body’. Never-theless, in order to imagine the ‘sameness’ of ‘the body’, let alone to imagine


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‘the body’ as a thing, a possession or a kind of property, one must first takeanother conceptual leap and imagine ‘the body’ as circumscribed within awell-defined perimeter. This boundary condition underlies all acts ofappropriation since, in order for property to exist at all, it must be defined.The unbounded or the infinite cannot be owned as such. The basic differ-ence between an expanse of the earth’s surface and a ‘piece of property’inheres in the imaginary (and yet oh so material) work that first delimits the‘piece’ as a coherent, separable part and then distinguishes this piece fromall others by assigning its immanent potential to an owner. The boundarythat defines land as property does not emerge from the land itself. Rather,it enters the world through a human decision (in the etymological sense ofa violent cutting or rending) that renders the particularity of this part of theplanet ‘ownable’, or indeed owned, by conceptually dividing it – bothspatially and temporally – from the continuous unfoldings and enfoldingsof planetary processes.6

In order for something – or some thing – to be someone’s – or someone’s – property, the boundary that has been drawn around it must bedefensible. In ‘owning’ property, in making it sensible and tangible as our‘own’, we lay claim to it though a duration of time. Property ownershipnecessarily entails a disposition which enables us to act as agents orsubjects in relation to whatever we possess for however long we possess it.Property ownership constitutes a form of dominion and dominion manifestsa force or power that resists and repels all opposing forces or powers withinits domain. If a boundary does not contain the domain within which thisforce or power – this agency or subjectivity – can freely act, then the distinc-tiveness of the property is lost. Applying this proprietary principle to ‘thebody’, then, we assume that the absence of the body’s well-defined boundaryresults either in death or servitude.7 All challenges to the boundedness of‘the body’ must appear as threatening, if not life-threatening, and must berepelled, even at great cost, since the possibility of peaceful coexistence isforeclosed by the exclusivity that property ownership implies. Thus, we find,underlying the logic which (mis)takes the human body for a kind of property,the assumption that ‘the body’ forms a defensible boundary. Such propri-etary and defensive assumptions take us far from either the Okanagan beliefthat ‘the body is the Earth itself’ or Sagan’s claim that ‘we are metameta-zoans’. Yet these assumptions circumscribe the world in which we live, inso far as we live ‘in’ our bodies. So how did we come to dwell in this world?And is this the only possible world that can sustain our lives?

Habeas Corpus, or Embodying a Ground to Stand OnDuring the 17th century, Western Europe was a fairly tumultuous place tolive – to say the least. Religious and political conflict immersed much ofthe continent in wars of one sort or another for much of the period. Trans-formations wrought by the economic effects of colonialism, as well as bythe changes in state policy designed to capitalize (literally) on the newforms of wealth flowing in (or taken) from Africa, Asia and the Americas,


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gave rise both to new forms of conflict between and to new conflicts withinnations. The gradual disaggregation of feudal relations between people andland challenged traditional notions not only of social relations amongpeople but of personhood itself. New classes of citizens began to benefitfrom the circulation of wealth and to achieve greater social and geographi-cal mobility. Religious dissent, and especially new sects of Protestantism,shifted perceptions about God’s place in human lives and hence about theplace of humans in the world. These shifts in religious perspective alsounderwrote challenges to the political legitimacy of the monarchs whopreviously claimed their authority by divine right. Religiously motivatedconceptions of royal prerogative became increasingly untenable in contextswhere God’s immanence was available to all. Thus, as the rationality ofstates shifted from political theology to political philosophy, traditionalorganizations of power and control were challenged if not re-imagined.While the shifts throughout Europe were not synchronous or homogeneous,and indeed took quite divergent paths (as in the cases of England, Franceand the German states), the processes of political, economic, religious,philosophical and social change instigated widespread reconsiderations ofhow the world organized itself. Indeed, the names of the thinkers associ-ated with this period (Descartes, Galileo, Leibniz, Newton, Spinoza,Hobbes, Locke, etc.) serve as a convenient shorthand for such radicalreconsiderations.

Certainly this summary does little justice to the complex unfolding ofevents that transpired during the 1600s and early 1700s; nevertheless, itdoes gesture toward the horizon within which ‘the body’ came to replace ‘thesoul’ as the founding locus for political subjectivity. The primal scene forthis profound imaginary metamorphosis was England. Here in the bloodycrucible of civil war and revolution – from the beheading of one king to theexpulsion of another and the subsequent importation of a third – coalescednew theories of political allegiance and subjectivity which continue to serveas the basis for political and economic thinking about personhood eventoday. One such enduring theoretical precipitate was Thomas Hobbes’sLeviathan (1651), the infamous tome in which Hobbes conjured a politicalontology ‘geometrically’ derived from the physics of ‘bodies’ (meaningobjects with mass) and motion. Following a rigorous path of logical exposi-tion from this initial material premise, Hobbes affirmed what he took to bean indisputable basis for securing the cohesion of the commonwealth.Written on the cusp of the English Civil War (Hobbes fled to Paris after itspublication, fearing reprisal from a Parliament that might construe him asa Royalist), the Leviathan sought to establish a rational ground for politicalsovereignty that had no need of divine authority either to assert its legiti-macy or to command obedience.8 In fact, though Hobbes nowhere foresworereligion per se,9 his perspective was perceived to be sufficiently ‘god-less’to warrant (almost) his official castigation as an atheist in 1666.10 Ground-ing his theory of state in a political ontology – or indeed natural philosophy– of bodies, Hobbes’s infamous text underwrote the invention of a new


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secular political imaginary that no longer needed or wanted the divine tosanctify its aims.

The manifestations of this secular rendering of the state or ‘common-wealth’ reverberated throughout the political and philosophical mutationswhich transpired during this era. By imagining national cohesion as derivingnot from God per se but from ‘reason’ and ‘natural law’ (albeit both givenby God), Hobbes refigured the ‘body politic’ as material and immanentrather than immaterial and transcendent. This shift in the political terrainfrom theology to philosophy, from soul to body, proved to be radical, for itrecast politics as a matter of human rationality and thus for human inter-vention and change (despite Hobbes’s intention to found a polity that wasinvulnerable to upheavals). Until the mid 17th century, European monarchsclaimed, and were largely understood, to derive their authority and sover-eignty from divine dispensation. As a consequence of this divine invest-ment, earthly power organized itself vertically – from the top down – flowingout from the God-head onto the crowned heads (by way of the angels andother disembodied beings) and from there down to the various anointedpotentates, nobility, gentry and so on, down to the lowliest peasants, women,animals and plants. This explicitly hierarchal ranking, which ArthurLovejoy (1936) famously described as ‘the great chain of being’, definitivelyordered one’s soul according to the ‘degree’ of one’s birth.11 Within thishierarchical ordering, the monarch had an exemplary provenance for he (orrarely she) embodied not just the divinely anointed sovereign, but as suchalso the nation, its territory, and its people itself. This sacralization of thecrowned prince (who was needless to say also a mortal organism) as theincarnation of the body politic produced a peculiar dualistic doctrine thatErnst Kantorowicz (1957) denominated ‘the king’s two bodies’.12 Within thispolitical theology, the sacred body of the nation cohabited with the mortalbody of the sovereign for as long as the monarch’s body lived.13

One of the many consequences of this two-body doctrine was thateverything in the nation (land, dwellings, moveable wealth, people, live-stock, etc.) belonged to the monarch in as much as it was ultimately part ofthe crowned head’s ‘corporate body’.14 Yet even if God gave the monarchthis proprietary interest as part of his divine investment, historical prece-dent secured this privilege as well. As Michel Foucault explains, the theoryof monarchal possession claimed the crown’s proprietorship as a divine anda historical right:

When James I told the Star Chamber that kings sat on the Throne of God, hewas obviously referring to the theologico-political theory of divine right. Butin his view, his divine election – which effectively meant that he ownedEngland – had been prophesied and guaranteed by the Norman victory. . . .[I]t implied that England had been taken into possession, and that all Englishlands belonged to the Normans and the leader of the Normans, or in otherwords, the king. It was insofar as he was the leader of the Normans that theking was effectively the owner or the proprietor of the land of England. (1997:102)


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Certainly, specific delegations of parts of the realm could be made, so thatland, dwellings, wealth, people and animals could be accorded to familiesand individuals who were then entitled to their various holdings. However,these holdings were ultimately subject to the exercise of royal prerogative(for example, in the forms of taxation, secondment, forced loans, arbitraryimprisonment, punishment, and even execution) and thus not necessarilyimmune from arbitrary seizure or destruction. James I made this pointsuccinctly to the Houses of Parliament in 1609 when he avowed: ‘For toEmperors, or Kings that are Monarchs, their subjects’ bodies and goods aredue for their defense and maintenance’ (in Burgess, 1992: 848). Framed bythe theory of divine ordination, the King’s claim was extensive and knewfew proprietary bounds, not even the bounds of the subjects’ bodies. Thus,as Foucault has so graphically characterized it, within this organization ofpower, the monarch effectively exercised the right ‘to take life or let live’(1980: 136).15

Under different monarchs with different understandings of theirprerogative, citizens and properties, ‘bodies and goods’, were more or lessimposed upon. Yet the potential assertions of royal prerogative, howeverbenign, always ran athwart the citizen’s experiences of freedom. During the17th century, the descendants of James I – to whom Francis Baconattributed the aphorism: ‘Kings rule by their laws as God did by the laws ofnature’ (quoted in Milton, 1998: 684) – took an aggressive, if not in fact‘absolutist’, perspective on their prerogative. Indeed, the Stuart monarchsappeared to understand the ‘absoluteness’ of their rule as a ‘natural’ resultof their unique and sovereign ability to (metaphysically and politically)transform legislation passed by Parliament into ‘law’ (Daly, 1978).16 As aconsequence, they often understood themselves to be ‘the law’, or even abovethe law, which was a more contentious proposition altogether. As thingsturned out, this absolute investment in their paramount legal status did notdo much for their longevity, either as monarchs or as people. The executionof Charles I and the expulsion of James II punctuated a century duringwhich various challenges to royal power were made in the name of diversereligious, political, economic and social interests. In the midst of this periodof unsettled authority, and in order to establish principles of governance thatwould mitigate those excesses of royal power which repeatedly catalyzedpopular opposition to the crown, legal and political changes redefined someof the fundamental principles of governing.

One of the most enduring of these changes – indeed one whose signifi-cance has remained unsurpassed from then until now – was the HabeasCorpus Act of 1679 (Act 31 Chas. II. c. 2). Passed during the reign ofCharles II (the monarch restored to power in 1660 after the Cromwellianinterregnum that followed the beheading of his father Charles I in 1649),the Habeas Corpus Act installed a principle of limitation on royal or stateprerogative that continues to define the legal limits on executive authoritytoday.17 While the basic principle which the Habeas Corpus Act affirmed –namely, that the monarch, though sovereign, was bound by natural and


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common law – had been implicit in English jurisprudence since the signingof the Magna Carta, in practice things were not always so clear.18 Monarchscould circumvent writs of habeas corpus by various legal maneuvers, includ-ing assertions that the crown held powers of discretionary imprisonment,which seemed to call the whole principle into question (Guy, 1982; Reeve,1986). During the parliamentary debates leading up to the Civil War,Charles I’s disregard for the legal status of English property and personsgenerated much discussion about whether or not he had abrogated hismonarchal responsibility and therefore his monarchal authority (and ulti-mately his right to his monarchal head). Needless to say, in the wake of theRestoration and Charles II’s accession to the throne, there was much lesstolerance of the Crown’s disregard for the rights accorded by natural andcommon law. While the details of the passage of the Act are not importanthere, suffice it to say the general tenor of the discussion affirmed ‘thesanctity of the lives, liberties and properties of Englishmen’ (Nutting, 1960:536).19

The central claim of the Habeas Corpus Act is very simple: the exec-utive cannot imprison people unless it can show that it has a lawful reasonto do so. In order to ensure this legal protection against unlawful imprison-ment, a prisoner can obtain a writ of Habeas Corpus ad subjiciendum whichthe responsible authorities must answer by bringing the detained personbefore a court where the case for detention can be heard.20 As the Act states:

That wheresoever any person or persons shall bring any habeas corpusdirected unto any sheriff or sheriffs, gaoler, minister, or other person whatso-ever, for any person in his or their custody . . . the said officer or officers, hisor their under-officers or deputies, shall within three days after the servicethereof . . . bring or cause to be brought the body of the party so committedor restrained, into or before the lord chancellor, or lord keeper of that greatseal of England for the time being, or the judges, or the barons of the saidcourt from which the said writ shall issue . . .21

Here, the presentation of ‘the body of the party so committed or restrained’in court establishes the limits of the executive function of government. Thelegal formulation Habeas Corpus ad subjiciendum addresses itself (albeitdeferentially in the present subjunctive) to the Crown’s representative oragent as a competing form of subjection. Literally Habeas Corpus adsubjiciendum translates as: ‘You may/should have the body for submitting’.22

This ‘submitting’ renders ‘the body’ as the limit of the monarch’s power toexercise its authority legally over its subjects. Upon receiving a valid writ,whosoever ‘has’ ‘the body’ must present ‘the body of the party’ to the courtin order to allow the court to exercise its legal jurisdiction, which is in factthe jurisdiction of ‘the law’ per se. Under this doctrine, ‘the body’ appearsas both a natural and a legal metonym for ‘the person’ that inscribes ajudicial limit to the Crown’s exercise of violence on its subjects. ‘The body’,in this formulation, is decisive precisely because it marks a ‘natural’ or‘immanent’ locus of resistance to the divine and transcendent assertions of


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authority that underwrote royal prerogative.23 In other words, in response tothe monarch’s assertion of spiritually ordained power over ‘bodies andgoods’, ‘the body of the party’ emerges as a material impediment, formingthe ground, as it were, on which the citizen-subject can stake its formalclaim to due process of law.

Under the auspices of the Habeas Corpus Act, which formalized theapplication of the principle as universal (except when it gets suspended),24

‘the body’ legally appears as the counterpoint to monarchal violence.Theologically grounded theories of royal sovereignty and prerogativeaffirmed the monarch’s ordained right to exercise violence both in declar-ing war abroad and in punishing and/or killing subjects at home. Withinthis other-worldly framework, the monarch, as the temporal embodiment ofGod’s law and thus of the legal principle itself, contains the violence thatthe law contains.25 Paradoxically, then, the monarch’s raison d’être was tounify and pacify the realm by incorporating a violence that enabled thesovereign to negate any other violence which seemed to threaten this unityand pacification.26 Needless to say, this violent paradox left open some roomfor abuses of such power by monarchs and their minions. The HabeasCorpus Act sought to circumscribe these powers by specifying a legallimit to the crown’s authority to exercise violence on its own subjects. Atthe very least, it required the king or his representatives to submit to a legalassessment of the cause for which a body, and hence a person, could bephysically seized upon and incarcerated.

The specification here of ‘the body’ in lieu of ‘the person’ – and thusliterally and legally as the place of the person – nominates ‘the body’ as thematter which opposes the spirit that imbues the crown with its discretionaryforce. It thus establishes a countervailing philosophical basis – or even anontological foundation – for rights claims in a ‘nature’ that ‘the body’ thenrepresents in and for the person. Or, to put it another way, in the late 17thcentury ‘the body’ becomes incorporated as a legal stratagem in order toprovide a ‘natural’ ground for subjects as citizens.27 Shifting the politicalconsideration of the monarch’s legal authority from the theological to themundane, the Habeas Corpus Act grounds the legal rights of subjects, orthe rights of subjects to due legal process, in their bodies as such. This shiftconceptually detaches ‘the body’ from the realm which had heretofore beenconceived as co-extensive with the monarch’s (and hence God’s) authorityin order to redefine ‘it’ legally as a separable and indeed separate entity.Thus, ‘the body’ emerges as a legal referent, born under the threat of royalviolence, that affirms the subject’s ‘natural’ distinction from the theo-political domain within which a monarch can freely execute uncheckedviolence. ‘The body’ enters politics, then, not as a vital or biologicalphenomenon, but as a legal fiction that stands opposite the corporate bodyof the monarch. The violence that a ‘sovereign’ could inflict on its subjectsby virtue of their vulnerability as living and embodied beings produces anopposing formation, in which resistance to this violence affirms ‘the body’as a distinct legal and political entity. However, this juridico-political


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fabrication of ‘the body’ itself gives rise to a violent (conceptual) rending ofthe living person from the life-world in order to legally redress the violentseizures and imprisonments that monarchs claimed as their prerogative.Certainly, this fiction decisively altered the experiences of citizens withrespect to their sovereigns. But once this juridico-political decision hasbeen made, once ‘the body’ has been rendered a legal and political metonymfor the person, and once the living human being has been conceptually rentfrom the physical universe, how does the newly embodied subject come tounderstand and live this corporeal personhood as a vital possibility? Howdoes ‘the body’ literally and materially come to make sense as the place ofpersonhood? How does ‘it’ come to determine us epistemologically,psychologically and economically?

Personifying a Rightful BodyThe fictioning of ‘the body’ as the legal location of ‘the person’ radically re-imagined both the ontological and political basis for personhood. While thelegal incarnation of the embodied person did not itself ‘cause’ thesechanges, it provided a frame within which these changes could be incorpor-ated both philosophically and experientially. Yet this frame also needed tobe fleshed out in order for it to significantly inform, let alone transform, thevolatile historical and conceptual conditions from which it arose and inwhich it was intended to intervene. Perhaps the most substantial suchfleshing out of corporealized personhood appeared a decade and a half afterthe passage of the Habeas Corpus Act, when John Locke published thesecond edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694).Revising the first edition of his philosophical magnum opus at the instiga-tion of his friend, William Molyneux, who suggested that Locke include adiscussion of the principium individuationis, Locke appended a new chapterto the Essay entitled ‘Identity and Diversity’.28 Though written more than300 years ago, this chapter continues to provoke so much consternation andcontroversy that scholars still argue vociferously about what Locke’s textmeans.29 Suffice it to say the core of the argument concerns ‘what’ ‘a person’‘is’. Grossly characterized, the philosophical dispute arises between thosewho argue that Locke reasonably holds that ‘a person’ is more or less aneffect of accreted memories independent of any particular body and thosewho argue that such disembodied personhood does not and cannot fullyaccount for the complexities of human existence. Be that as it may, anddespite whatever other complex nuances it conveys, the highly debatedLockean notion of personhood appears at the end of the 17th century in partas an attempt to interrupt the political and philosophical effects embeddedin political theology’s equation of ‘person’ with ‘soul’.

For Locke, the category of ‘soul’ presented a basic problem forknowledge in as much as the soul is constitutively unknowable. Suchunknowability vexed Locke, since as Adriana Cavarero recently suggests,his project foregounds what a person is rather than who a person is, andthus his thinking necessarily relies on the epistemological possibility of


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defining this ‘whatness’ (2002b: 97). Whether the soul is immortal or not,or indivisible or not, according to Locke, exceeds the purview of humanunderstanding and hence cannot serve as an adequate foundation fordefining personhood. Invoking the example of resurrection – a vexingproblem through which Christian theology had debated the body’s status forseveral hundred years (Bynum, 1996; Vidal, 2002) – Locke avers:

The body, as well as the soul, goes to the making of a man. And thus we beable, without any difficulty, to conceive the same person at the resurrection,though in a body not exactly in make or parts the same which he had here,– the same consciousness going along with the same soul that inhabits it. Butyet the soul alone, in that change of bodies, would scarce to anyone but tohim that makes the soul of man, be enough to make the same man. (II § 27:15)

As evidence for this claim, Locke then offers the example of ‘the soul of aprince, carrying with it the consciousness of the prince’s past life’ that‘enter[s] and inform[s] the body of a cobbler’ (II § 27: 15). In this case,Locke concludes that the soul cannot be enough to make the person since‘the soul, with all its princely thoughts about it would not make another man:but he would be the same cobbler to every one besides himself’ (II § 27:15). Here, by virtue of the example itself, we discern that Locke’s concernwith personhood lies in the social and political rather than the theologicaldomain. Soul may be enough to identify a person ‘to him that makes thesoul of man’ but not to anyone, and certainly not to anybody, else. Posingthe problem in this way we see that Locke’s philosophical interest in person-hood focused on the moral and legal consequences that accrue to humanactions in so far as they can be ascribed to human agents. Indeed, he explic-itly states that ‘“Person” is a forensic term . . . appropriating actions andtheir merit; and so belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, andhappiness and misery’ (II § 27: 26).

In the wake of Locke’s analysis, ‘personhood’ has come to character-ize a legal, moral, ethical and even psychological subject. Indeed, asCharles Taylor has argued, Locke’s postulation of a ‘punctual self’ as thereasoning agent behind human action ‘helps explain why we think ofourselves as “selves” today’ (1989: 174). However, while Locke’s formu-lation certainly fuses the thinking of ourselves with the being of our ‘selves’,this thinking being – or as he puts it ‘thinking thing’ – cannot be function-ally disembodied, unlike Descartes had supposed before him. Perhaps it isnot so surprising that Locke was more attached to the living body thanDescartes.30 After all, Locke’s first training had been in medicine and hehad served as the assistant to and become a close friend of one of the 17thcentury’s greatest physicians and advocates of the Hippocratic tradition,Thomas Sydenham (Coleman, 2000; Romanell, 1984). Indeed, throughouthis career Locke maintained an abiding interest in medical matters, and the(literal) matter of medicine, as his ongoing efforts to record meteorological


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data and to correlate it with health and illness testify (Dewhurst, 1962,1963). Also, Locke’s own delicate health, which impelled him to leaveEngland in 1675 in search of more salubrious surroundings, might havecontributed to a greater appreciation of bodily matters in questions ofpersonhood.31 Moreover, Locke had already recognized the political utilityof ‘the body’ as the basis for legal personhood in his Second Treatise onGovernment (as mentioned above and considered again below), which hadalso appeared about ten years after the passage of the Habeas Corpus Act.

Hence, while Locke certainly foregrounded consciousness as essen-tial to personhood, for Locke, consciousness itself presupposes a sensuous,if not embodied, immanence in the world:

[W]e must consider what a person stands for; – which I think, is an intelli-gent being, that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself,the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only bythat consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems tome, essential to it: it being impossible for any one to perceive without perceiv-ing that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, orwill anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our presentsensations and perceptions: and by this every one is to himself that which hecalls self: - it not being considered in this case, whether the same self becontinued in the same or divers substances. (II § 27: 9)

In this famous passage, Locke imagines ‘consciousness’ as that whichpresents and represents ‘a person’ to its ‘self’. Yet, since Locke also care-fully discriminates between thinking and consciousness per se, he explic-itly differentiates his understanding from Descartes’ Cogito, in whichthinking appears as self-evident to itself and thus as the necessary andsufficient evidence for ‘the self’. Interposing consciousness as the ‘insepa-rable’ and ‘essential’ companion of thinking, Locke affirms that the matterof selfhood (in both senses) literally rests on and in ‘our present sensationsand perceptions’, and that only ‘by this every one is to himself that whichhe calls self’. Thus, Locke indicates that consciousness must exist in asensuous and perceptive medium, although he brackets the question ofwhether this conscious self-presence depends on ‘the same or diverssubstances’. Of course the appearance of this sensuous underpinning is nogreat surprise since Locke’s entire theory of knowledge is predicated onsensation, which he defines as the ‘great source of most of the ideas we have,depending wholly upon our senses’ (II § 1: 3). Despite this (albeit murky)recognition of consciousness’s sensuous self-knowledge, however, some-thing still seems to be missing here – a lurking missing something uponwhose back, it turns out, the edifice of consciousness rises.

In the sections immediately preceding Locke’s reflections onconsciousness and personal identity, he introduces a different figure whomysteriously disappears as soon as Locke conjures ‘the person’ as the heroof his discussion. This supporting character, whose work sustains conscious-ness’s leading role, much as the slave sustains the master, or perhaps more


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pertinently, as the wage laborer enriches the capitalist, is called by Locke‘the same man’. In a section entitled ‘The Identity of Man’, Locke posits thisfigure as the accreted effect of embodiment:

[T]he identity of the same man consists . . . in nothing but a participation ofthe same continued life, by constantly fleeting particles of matter, in succes-sion vitally united to the same organized body. He that shall place the identityof man in anything else, but, like that of other animals, in one fitly organizedbody, taken in any one instant, and from thence continued, under one organiz-ation of life, in several successively fleeting particles of matter united to it,will find it hard to make an embryo, one of years, mad and sober, the sameman by any supposition, that will not make it possible for Seth, Ismael,Socrates, Pilate, St. Austin, and Caesar Borgia, to be the same man. For ifthe identity of the soul alone makes the same man; and there be nothing inthe nature of matter why the same individual spirit may not be united todifferent bodies, it will be possible that those men, living in distant ages, andof different tempers, may have been the same man: which way of speakingmust be from a very strange use of the word man, applied to an idea out ofwhich body and shape are excluded. (II § 27: 6)

The ‘identity’ that Locke posits here as a formal self-relation surreptitiouslyintroduces a new figure into his argument: ‘the same man’. This figurehypostatizes the ‘same organized body’ by accreting to itself ‘constantlyfleeting particles of matter in succession vitally united’, thereby establish-ing the ‘participation of the same organized life’. A number of things shouldbe noted here about the conceptual work this embodied identity performs.To begin with, the sameness of ‘the same body’ affirms a continuity in theface of difference, or an identity in the face of diversity, as the chapter titleindicates. The comparison of two instances of ‘the same body’ across timeaffirms an identity – its sameness – precisely insofar as those ‘constantlyfleeting particles of matter’ – its diversity – appear as having no significancewhatsoever. The ‘one fitly organized body’ that defines the identity of bothman and animal plays a crucial role here, since its continuity ‘under oneorganization of life’ binds up the temporal discontinuities which continuallydisrupt the ‘sameness’ of its materiality. In other words, ‘the same body’ isa theoretical fiction that incorporates a contradiction – sameness-in-difference – which Locke then rectifies by personifying it as ‘the same man’.

The ‘sameness’ of man, as both an idea and a figure, serves as thebridge across which ‘the person’ enters Locke’s text. In this sense ‘the sameman’ conceptually and rhetorically personifies ‘the same body’, a hyposta-tization that then collapses into ‘the person’ as the privileged framework forhuman self-understanding. This unremarked personification, or should I say,impersonation, performs incredibly important work for how we have cometo experience ourselves as embodied beings over the last several hundredyears. In the first instance, Locke’s elision of the ‘same body’ and the ‘sameman’ as the substrates – or even the precipitates – of the ‘same person’makes the notion of ‘having a body’ psychologically plausible. While most


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commentators focus on the ways Locke foregrounds consciousness as consti-tutive of personhood, few recognize a back formation which subtends thispossibility: in order to affirm the ownership of one’s body as the ground forlegal and political personhood (as Locke so famously does in The SecondTreatise), it becomes necessary to make this juridico-political formulationmake sense both conceptually and sensually as a mode of living. He doesthis precisely by annexing consciousness as the constituent form of self-hood to ‘the same body’ as the locus within which, or through which, thisconsciousness literally and materially lives (Yolton, 2001). In so doing,Locke produces a liminal or indeed ghostly figure, ‘the same man’, whoincorporates ‘the same body’ by retrofitting this body with a consciousnessthat makes it known to itself (‘When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate,or will anything, we know that we do so’, 27: 9 discussed above, myemphasis). Weirdly, this personified body/man manifests a strange and yethauntingly familiar doubleness. For, if heretofore a ‘duplicity’ of person hadbeen the defining attribute of reigning monarchs, whose ‘two bodies’ incor-porated the territorial principle of sovereignty in the body of a living – andhence mortal – being, the new philosophy generalized this doubleness as aconstituent condition of all persons in so far as they are also political andlegal subjects.

The ‘king’s two bodies’ principle, which Kantorowicz discerned inearly modern political theology, therefore seems to presage the self-doublingthat subtends Locke’s same man/same person articulation. Indeed, we mightconsider that Locke makes the bifurcated royal subject immanent, ratherthan transcendent, by projecting the political principle into a legal andpsychological framework of ‘personhood’, which then provides a general andgeneralizable condition for human ‘identity’. While the chapter on ‘Identityand Diversity’ first appeared as an addendum to the second edition of TheEssay on Human Understanding (an ostensibly epistemological rather thanpolitical text), its implications offer a helpful elucidation of Locke’s slightlyearlier assertion that the laboring body establishes the very principle ofproperty. When Locke avers in The Second Treatise of Government that:

Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet everyman has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to buthimself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, areproperly his . . . (1764: II § 27)

he affirms a doubleness of the laboring subject which he will conceptuallyelaborate in his discussion of the ‘personified man’. According to Locke’spolitical affirmation, the laborer exists in an objectified relation to his labor,which he ‘owns’ as his own: ‘labour being the unquestionable property ofthe labourer’. By reifying this bodily activity (labor) as an own-able resourcethat belongs as ‘unquestionable property’ to the agent who performs thisaction (the laborer), Locke invokes another kind of identity-in-diversity. Thetransforming work that labor ‘is’ necessarily manifests a difference in theworld, a difference that ‘the body’ literally makes.32


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Yet the relation of ownership binds this world-changing temporalprocess (labor) back to the laborer through a material medium which laboritself has transformed: ‘Whatsoever then he removes out of the state thatnature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, andjoined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property’(1764: II § 27). Labor returns to the laborer as his property through a bela-bored ‘nature’ that only becomes property through the infusion of bodilyactivity which extracts it, or as Locke suggests ‘frees it’, from the ‘state’ inwhich it had been previously ‘left’. The logic here anticipates the ‘samebody’ that binds up ‘constantly fleeting particles of matter’ and therebygrounds the ‘sameness’ of ‘the same man’. Labor, a temporally extendedprocess, is accorded a self-consistency by being located in a body whichthen gets effaced when labor is construed as the ‘property’ of the laborerwho personifies it. In this formulation, ‘the body’ from which the laborproceeds (‘the labor of his body and the work of his hands’) disappears,subsumed on the one hand into the objects of the labor ‘it’ performs and onthe other into the laborer who owns these efforts. Thus, the body ismetonymically elided on the one hand into its world-transforming activityand on the other into the political and legal agent who takes possession ofwhat these activities produce.

Locke’s property-owning, property-creating ‘person’ introduces afundamental refiguration of the living, laboring human being by constitut-ing a self-difference (labor/laborer) as a form of identity (property).Moreover, it makes this identity-in-difference thinkable by personifying ‘thebody’ as the laborer and through this personification effacing the specificdifference that ‘the body’ ‘is’. Instead of valuing the corporeal locus ofhuman being as the immanent realization of difference-producing agency,Locke’s seminal formulation re-imagines this human potentiality as a kindof property (labor) owned by its personification (laborer) which in turn makesthe principle of property itself plausible as a way of dividing up the world.Only in the wake of such a conceptual convolution does the notion thatlabor is intrinsically alienable and that it therefore can be contractuallyalienated emerge as a credible way to organize human relations. To thisconvolution we owe both the realization of wage labor as a general economiccondition and the idea that a person’s worth can be specified by the amountof money which the body’s labor can command. Reflecting on Locke’sphilosophical interventions, then, helps us understand how ‘a body worthhaving’ enters the world not just as a conceptual possibility but as a livedeconomic relation. For, in so far as wage labor comes to define a dominantand dominating form of human activity, it informs and incorporates the livinghuman being in its image.

Coda: Bare Naked BodyThis article addresses a deceptively simple question: ‘what makes a bodyworth having?’ Depending on how you inflect it, the question can parse inat least two ways – what makes ‘a body’ worth ‘having’? and what makes ‘a


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body worth having’?33 Yet, as sly as this ambivalent inflection might seem,the question’s deceptive simplicity really derives from another feintsecluded in its syntax: addressed to an implied subject, an unvoiced ‘you’,the interrogative silently invokes the very assumptions on which it rests.When what we call ‘a body’ supposes that it has always already been ‘had’by someone; when we assume that where a person ‘is’, ‘a body’ will havebeen had; when the having of a body personifies a person; then it is ‘thebody’ that makes ‘the person’ to whom the question addresses itself worthyof the question in the first place. Ask not what ‘the body’ can do for you, forthe body-you-are, construed as the body-you-have, has already made youyou. Framed slightly differently, however, the question begins to reveal adifferent critical perspective: why does ‘having a body’ become the idiomthrough which we appreciate our experiences of aliveness and vitality –including all the sensations, pleasures, risks, challenges and suffering thatthese experiences entail?

The having of a body might seem to us, in our part of the world, anatural or necessary way to represent the organismic dimension of humanexistence; yet, this is not naturally or necessarily the case. As JeanetteArmstrong’s depiction of the Okanagan worldview demonstrates, the ‘landdreaming capacity’ figures the vital materiality of human being just as wellas ‘the body’ does – though with radically different, and to me, quitecompelling, ethical, aesthetic, moral and political nuances. Rather thanappreciating the appeal of such metaphorical, and perhaps metaphysical,resources, however, our political ontology secretly conjures ‘the nature ofthe body’, in order to discretely manifest its thoroughly bio-political magic.(The socio-biologist’s or evolutionary psychologist’s incantation that ‘thebody determines our [human] nature’ demonstrates this bio-political sleightof hand nicely.)34 Strictly speaking, ‘the body’ does not naturally exist. Or,to put it more affirmatively: ‘the body’ only exists within a political ontologythat distinguishes the human organism both from its life-world and from ‘theperson’ to whom ‘it’ supposedly belongs. Within this ontological frame,human personhood appears as a subsequent, or even consequent, relationto a self-defining (and ‘self’ defining) form of living matter which ‘the body’then names as its proper reference. Only our bio-politics, and not ‘ournature’, makes ‘the body’ seem natural to us.

Giorgio Agamben has recently undertaken to disclose the bio-political logic that subtends this embodied problematic in a series of medi-tations on what he calls ‘homo sacer’. According to Agamben, the ancientGreeks bifurcated life into two modes, zoe and bios, and this bifurcationsustains and underwrites all Western politics – or, as he says, is ‘con-substantial with it’: ‘Zoe . . . expressed the simple fact of living common toall living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios . . . indicated the form orway of living proper to an individual or a group’ (1998: 1). For Agamben,this distinction announces the founding of the polis as an act of exclusionor ablation though which the city-state first extracts itself from the life-worldand then literally defines itself by constituting a threshold between itself and


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the ‘nature’ outside its gates. In so doing, it concomitantly locates thisthreshold within each of its citizens as the bifurcated form of their own selfrelation. By distinguishing itself from the life lived ‘outside’ its walls, thepolis overwrites or obscures the ‘bare life’ (zoe) of the living beings livingwithin its ambit by inscribing them with its political form (bios):

In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whoseexclusion founds the city of men. . . . There is politics because man is theliving being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own barelife and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life inan inclusive exclusion. (1998: 7–8)

Thus, unqualified life, or what Agamben denominates ‘bare’ or ‘naked’ life,35

is precisely always already at stake politically, even if it is that which cannever appear politically as such. Since its existence as vital phenomenongets entirely overdetermined by a specifically human mode of politicalbeing, bare naked life only becomes visible, according to Agamben, underthe threat of a legally sanctioned death, which negatively reveals the latentliving potential that the polis has always already incorporated.

Agamben claims that sovereignty always already incorporates ‘barelife’ because sovereignty both gives rise to and exposes it as such. Sincethe pre-political life of the human animal knows no distinction betweenitself and the continuous life of the planet, its life is not bare or naked,but embraced and encompassed. As Georges Bataille put it so beautifully:‘The animal is in life like water in water’ (1989: 24). In other words, theun-human life does not know itself as such; it lives.36 But politics (whichAgamben associates with language? or is language the original politicalform?) divides the human animal within it. In this irreducible livingdifference – a living difference that Jacques Lacan also recognized butinterpreted psychically or existentially37 – the pathos of politics is born.Agamben locates bare naked life in the singular person, the homo sacer,exposed to death. Thus, bare naked life forms a living singularity that, inexposing living as such (and only before death), reveals its location aswhat we might now call ‘the body’ – though, as Agamben points out,ancient Greek had no equivalent for our sense of ‘the body’ since theirword, soma, referred to the corpse. Indeed, we might argue that ‘the body’becomes the proper location of the living human only at the moment whenit begins to serve as its legal address. As the discussion of habeas corpusabove suggests, challenging the subject’s exposure to sovereign violence(and hence following Agamben’s thinking, its appearance as bare life)provides a new ground for political ontology. Through the demand that themonarch or its representatives present ‘the body’ in court as the form ofthe subject’s legal right, the body comes to incorporate the person as itsproper owner.38

Resisting or subverting the sovereign claims of political theology re-oriented the human life context. For, so long as they were interpellated by


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it, the life of the soul, with its eternal durée, served as a major obstacle forthose who might want to oppose sovereign powers that proclaimed theirdivine ordination.39 The mortal life of the organism offered an alternatelocus operandi for political challenges to ‘divine’ monarchs and subse-quently for politics itself. Thus, we can discern the outline of a new politi-cal ontology in ‘the body’ that emerges legally and politically in the wakeof the Habeas Corpus Act. For only following this body’s juridico-political‘birth’ can rights be claimed on the basis of a nature which it representsin and for the subject. This initial formulation introduces the figure of theliberal subject as personified by the living human body. Of course, thispolitical formulation is concurrent with the economic one that both precip-itates and supports it. For, in the late 17th century, ‘the body’ is concep-tually torn from the world and from the kingdom, philosophically,politically and economically. In other words – Locke’s word actually – itis removed from ‘the state in which nature had left it’ by an intellectuallabor that mingles with ‘it’ and transforms it from bare nature into personalproperty. ‘The body’ emerges then as a legal and philosophical metonymfor ‘the person’ precisely in so far as it grounds personhood materially andthereby serves as a counterpoint to theological claims for sovereign author-ity. This material person, or personified matter, serves as a fulcrum withwhich to prise apart the theo-political edifice of monarchal absolutism byre-appropriating the very corporeality which Christianity had abjected. Inthis sense, we might say that liberal political philosophy ironically resur-rects ‘the body’ in order to disrupt the transcendental foundations claimedby sovereign authority. When conjured in response to a writ of habeascorpus, ‘the body’ produced – in both senses – in the courtroom in lieu ofthe person, i.e. as the legal place of the person, offers a material antidoteto ‘the soul’, whose eternal disposition political theology had used to renderlegal subjects forever subject to the sovereign’s absolute authority.

Certainly in the context of early modern Europe, it made a lot of senseto invest (in) ‘the body’ as the living location of personhood and to conceive‘the body’ as the kind of property that grounds the right to own property –as Locke did. The strategic efficacy of this investment in human life waspalpable to say the least. To take just one extremely important example: ahundred years later in The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine could extrapolatefrom this premise in order to explain the liberal subject’s (a.k.a. ‘man’s’)efflorescence during the French revolution by deriving political sovereigntyexplicitly from ‘the rights and freedom of the living’ (1791, my emphasis).From this ‘living’ political subject, Paine deduces the putative equality ofcitizens, since ‘equality of birth’ means that the law recognizes us as ‘bornequal in rights’ in so far as we are all equally born (i.e. in order to be aperson we must have a body). By the end of the 18th century, when ‘theliving’ have finally displaced both ‘the dead’ and ‘the soul’ as the sovereignprinciple that founds the nation, we might say that ‘the body’ has gottenfully enshrined as a political metonym for the person. Yet as valuable as‘the body’ has been in grounding the tenets of liberal political thought, it


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remains a reaction formation to sovereign violence and, as such, unwittinglyre-contains this same violence within itself.

As bodies we are violently torn from the world’s embrace and belat-edly return to it as property owners of ourselves. In this sense, we mightconsider that ‘a body worth having’ both bears – and bares – the traces ofthe very sovereign violence to which it initially served as a legal and politi-cal alternative. In other words, ‘the body’, born out of a strategic legal andpolitical decision (once again with its etymological emphasis on cutting andrending), conserves the trauma of its violent inception. We might, followingWendy Brown’s critique of identity politics, consider whether ‘the body’ thusserves as the paramount form of a ‘wounded attachment’ (1995: 53–76). Ifour attachment to ‘the body’, conceived as both the site and the source ofour personhood, conceals an unremarked political wound, then perhapsrecognizing its contingency might allow us to re-imagine our corporeal situ-ations differently. While the poetic appeal of the Okanagan ‘land dreamingcapacity’ might not hail all of us equally, it does at least suggest that wemight invoke other imaginative resources besides ‘the body’ in order toencompass, or indeed to appreciate, the vital dimensions of our livingbeing.40 In any case, perhaps it is time to reconsider whether ‘a body’ isreally worth having and whether the worth of such ‘a body’ lies primarily inthe political ontology that it founds. For, even if ‘the body’, construed as thedistinctive form of human living, has proved strategically effective inbirthing liberal citizen-subjects, it has not really helped us understand howas living human bodies we can live together either with each other or withother forms of life.

In this era, when neo-liberalism reigns triumphant, far too many of thepolitical, economic, social, psychological and ecological problems thatchallenge us derive from our limited resources for imagining our being asliving beings together. The reduction of human life to ‘a body worth having’naturalizes the premises of possessive individualism as the bedrock for all‘rational’ collective decision making; it thereby invalidates other forms ofappreciating life (including human life) that do not so easily reduce to suchputative singularities. The notion that ‘the market’ or ‘competition’ providethe best ways to regulate all vital forms of human coexistence depends onthe premise that human life itself, as living human being, can be fundamen-tally and entirely encompassed within ‘a body’ that is someone’s personalproperty. By interrogating the assumption that we are the bodies we have,or that we even have bodies in the first place – since bodies are after allactually bio-chemical transformations of matter and energy localized in timeand space – we might begin to open ourselves to vital new possibilities, atonce political and personal, material and spiritual, local and global. Andperhaps such possibilities might enable us to body forth and flesh out newways of living together with more equity, more justice, more compassion andmore grace. At least that is the reverie inspired by my own land-dreamingcapacity.


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Notes

1. While C.B. Macpherson’s essential analysis of liberalism (1962) is not discusseddirectly, this article is obviously indebted to it throughout.2. Since the middle of the 19th century, there has also been another ‘disembodied’form of legal person, i.e. the corporation. However, it is certainly not coincidentalthat this non-corporeal legal subject, constituted entirely in order to facilitate thepossession and transference of property, should nominally affirm its similarity tothe embodied person in its very name.3. The discourse of psychoanalysis – especially in its recent feminist and/orLacanian incarnations – extensively engages this being/having dynamic throughconsiderations of ‘being/having the phallus’ (see, for example, Borsch-Jacobsen,1991: 43–71; Butler, 1993: 57–92; Lacan, 1977: 281–91).4. For an excellent critique of the Darwinian notions of ‘fitness’ as ‘adaptation toan environment’ and an explanation for the co-evolution of the organism–environ-ment dyad, see Lewontin (1992).5. On the paradox of individuation as a form of selfhood, see Simondon (1992).6. The precariousness of this imaginary-yet-real decision is well known to ‘owners’of coastal property, where the uncontainable and often uncontained processes ofocean and weather can erase the even most well defined, and defended, propertylines. Recent planetary history has underscored this vulnerability as the effects ofthe December 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean and of Hurricane Katrina in theGulf of Mexico amply illustrate.7. For example, this same proprietary defensiveness informs Hobbes’s famousaffirmation of ‘self defense’ as the first ‘right of nature’ (Hobbes, 1968: 189).8. In Leviathan, Chapter 39, Hobbes elucidates his famous critique, abjuring theuse of spiritual precepts to political ends:

Temporall and Spirituall Government, are but two words brought into theworld, to make men see double, and mistake their Lawfull Soveraign. . . .[T]hat Governor must be one; or else there must needs follow Faction, andCivil War in the Common-wealth, between the Church and the State; betweenSpiritualists and Temporalists; between the Sword of Justice, and the Shieldof Faith; and (which is more) in every Christian man’s own brest, betweenthe Christian and the Man. (1968: 498–9)

For Hobbes, resorting to political theology in order to ground sovereign authorityinduces a bifurcation – both within the person and the Commonwealth – that inevi-tably undermines political stability. His political ontology seeks to circumvent suchinstability, or indeed insurrection, by positing a unitary material ground for thepolity. On Hobbes’ critique see Shapin and Schaffer (1985: 80–109).9. On Hobbes’ theological understanding, see Springborg (1975: 289–303) andFoisneau (2001).10. A ‘Bill against Atheism and Profaneness’ was introduced in the House ofCommons, specifying Leviathan by name. The bill passed the Commons but theHouse of Lords allowed it to die in the next session.11. Lovejoy’s book is one of the most influential and controversial in the disciplineestablished in its wake: the history of ideas. As a foundational text it has given rise


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to a vast archive of secondary literature too extensive to be named here. OnLovejoy’s notion of hierarchy and its correspondence to medieval notions ofhierarchy, see Mahoney (1987).12. On Kantorowitcz’s paradigm, see Agamben (1998: 91–103).13. See, for example, Forset (1606). For a genealogy of the metaphor ‘body politic’as it underwrites this theo-political paradigm, see Hale (1971).14. On the body/head distinction, see Cavarero (2002a: 99–120).15. The full citation underscores the implications of sovereign violence:

The sovereign exercised his right to life only by exercising his right to kill,or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only throughthe death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the‘power of life and death’ was in reality the right to take life or let live. Itssymbol, after all, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be referredto a historical type of society in which power was exercised mainly as a meansof deduction (prélèvement), a subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate aportion of the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and blood,levied on the subjects. Power in this instance was essentially a right ofseizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in theprivilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it. (Foucault, 1980: 136)

16. Citing Forset (1606), Daly comments:

While . . . the two houses of parliament had to consent to legislation, it wasthe king’s le Roi le veult which actually changed a bill into law. It was naturalenough to describe this life-giving legal power as an attribute of royal abso-lutism, another expression of sole superiority. (1978: 232, my emphasis)

17. Habeas corpus continues to function as a limiting principle on improper usesof executive authority to incarcerate people as its recent use in the cases of people(illegally?) detained after September 11, 2001, or of prisoners captured inAfghanistan and held by the US military in cages at a base in Guantanamo illus-trate (see Butler, 2004: 50–100).18. Section 39 of the Magna Carta, assented to under duress by King John I in1215 at Runnymede, reads: ‘No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseisedor exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him,except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.’19. Not surprisingly, Charles II and his allies vehemently contested the Act’spassage. The Act, in various versions, was introduced repeatedly between 1668 and1679 before its final passage. For a thorough account of this process, see Nutting(1960).20. The form of habeas corpus had appeared by the 13th century but it did not haveeither the effect or the intent of the modern notion. Initially used to negotiate thecompeting jurisdictions of different courts, it was only during the late Tudor periodthat it began to be used to redress discretionary imprisonment. For a history of theconcept, see Sharpe (1989).21. Modern History Sourcebook: www.constitution.org/eng/habcorpa.html (accessed13 April 2008).


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22. Thanks to Livia Tenzer for her Latin expertise.

23. On the significance of the ‘plane of immanence’ for the critical articulation ofmodernity, see Hardt and Negri (2002: 70–74).

24. On the suspension of habeas corpus, see Crawford (1915). On the ‘state ofexception’ more generally, see Agamben (2003).

25. This formulation echoes Derrida (1992).

26. Theories of violence and statehood often derive the early modern establishmentof the state and religion as two distinct domains or powers from the state’s consoli-dation of its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. For an excellent surveyand critique of this literature, see Cavanaugh (1995).

27. In a single unsupported sentence Marcel Mauss placed the idea of bodily selfpossession at an even earlier historical moment: ‘Old Germanic law still distin-guished between [the slave] and the free man, Leibeigen, proprietor of his own body’(1979: 81). While I am not an expert and can venture no guess as to Mauss’s sourcesfor this assertion, Liebeigen, which could literally translate as ‘own body’, actuallyseems to have referred to serfs, peons or bondsmen. Thus, I am not sure that thisis the sense of ‘proprietor of his own body’ that has carried over into the formationsof liberal personhood.

28. Locke acknowledges his fulfillment of Molyneux’s request in a letter to him inAugust 1693 (see Allison, 1966: 41–2).

29. Philosophers have been arguing about Locke’s ideas since the minute they werepublished and probably even before. During the 18th century, Leibniz (in NewEssays Concerning Human Understanding) and Hume (in Treatise of Human Nature)most famously took up Locke’s theory of personal identity and refuted variousaspects of it more or less successfully. More recently Derek Parfit’s Reasons andPersons has unleashed a riot of philosophical writing for and against the neo-Lockean perspective. The bibliography here is extensive. Two essays that revealthe tenor of these polemics are Atkins (2000) and Noonan (1998).

30. This is not to say that Descartes had no regard for the living organism, nor thathe had no appreciation for how corporeality effects the person. In his last work Onthe Passions of the Mind (Les Passions de l’Ame [1649]) and in his correspondencewith Princess Elizabeth regarding the role of the passions, as well as in his posthum-ously published text on physiology, Description of the Human Body, he attempts toexplicate the material dimensions of human life and especially the ways that thepassions compounded both body and mind (see Cook, 2002). On Descartes’ relationto contemporary medical thought and his own health care, see Shapin (2000),Gorham (1994), Carter (1983) and Londeboom (1979).

31. On Locke’s health, see ‘John Locke’, in The Internet Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy, http: //www.utm.edu/research/iep/l/locke.htm and ‘John Locke’, TheStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http: //plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/.

32. See Paulo Virno’s discussion of ‘labor-power’ as embodied potential (2004:81–4).

33. Judith Butler evokes a similar conceit with her title Bodies that Matter (1993).

34. For an excellent discussion that considers the historical emergence of ‘humannature’ as a segue between theological and social forms of determinism, i.e. between‘fate’ and ‘society’, see Poovey (2002).


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35. The translation of Agamben’s idiom varies. For a commentary on this problem,see the translators’ note in Agamben (2000: 142).36. The idiom ‘un-human’ derives from Donna Haraway (1992) in contrast to theuse of ‘non-human’ preferred by Bruno Latour (1993).37. Using a figure that is simultaneously botanical and surgical, Lacan describesthis self splitting as ‘a certain dehiscence at the heart of the subject’ (1977: 4).38. For Agamben, the pivotal role played by habeas corpus appears accidental:

The fact that, of all the various jurisdictional regulations concerned with theprotection of individual freedom, it was habeas corpus that assumed the formof law and thus became inseparable from the history of Western democracyis surely due to mere circumstance. (Agamben, 1998: 124, my emphasis)

What I have tried to argue here is that the ‘mere circumstance’ to which Agambenalludes is in fact quite significant in so far as it encompasses political theology’srole in legitimating monarchal sovereignty to which ‘the body’ comes to serve as amundane critique.39. It is certainly no coincidence that when Louis Althusser wanted to illustratethe working of ideology as the interpellation of the ‘subject’ before the ‘Subject’, heinvoked Christian theology as the paradigmatic example (1971: 178–83).40. Donna Haraway, for one, has repeatedly turned to science fiction as an imag-inative repertoire for precisely this reason (see, for example, Haraway, 1991, 1992).

References

Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Agamben, G. (2000) Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti andC. Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Agamben, G. (2003) L’État d’exception: Homo Sacer II, trans. J. Gayraud. Paris:Éditions de Seuil.Allison, H. (1966) ‘Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity: A Re-Examination’, Journalof the History of Ideas 27(1): 41–58.Althusser, L. (1971) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, pp. 127–86 inLenin and Philosophy, trans. B. Brewster. London: Verso.Armstrong, J. (1996) ‘Sharing One Skin: Okanagan Community’, in J. Mander andE. Goldsmith (eds) The Case Against the Global Economy and For a Turn Towardthe Local. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.Atkins, K. (2000) ‘Personal Identity and the Importance of One’s Own Body’,International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8(3): 329–49.Bataille, G. (1989) Theory of Religion. New York: Zone.Borsch-Jacobsen, M. (1991) Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. D. Brick. Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press.Brown, W. (1995) States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Burgess, G. (1992) ‘The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered’, English HistoricalReview 107(425): 837–61.


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Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York:Routledge.Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London:Verso.Bynum, C.W. (1996) The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity,200–1336. New York: Columbia University Press.Carter, R. (1983) Descartes’ Medical Philosophy. Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press.Cavanaugh, W. (1995) ‘“A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House”: The Warsof Religion and the Rise of the State’, Modern Theology 11(4): 396–420.Cavarero, A. (2002a) Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy and the Question ofGender, trans. R. de Lucca and D. Shemek. Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress.Cavarero, A. (2002b) ‘Who Engenders Politics?’, in G. Parati and R. West (eds)Italian Feminist Theory and Practice: Equality and Sexual Difference. London:Associated University Presses.Coleman, W. (2000) ‘The Significance of John Locke’s Medical Studies for HisEconomic Thought’, History of Political Economy 32(4): 711–31.Cook, H. (2002) ‘Body and Passions: Materialism and the Early Modern State’,Osiris 17(1): 25–48.Crawford, C. (1915) ‘The Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act and the Revolutionof 1689’, English Historical Review 30(120): 613–30.Daly, J. (1978) ‘The Idea of Absolute Monarchy in Seventeenth-century England’,Historical Journal 21(2): 227–50.Derrida, J. (1992) ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, inD. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld and D.G. Carlson (eds) Deconstruction and the Possibilityof Justice. New York: Routledge.Dewhurst, K. (1962) ‘A Review of John Locke’s Research in Social and Preventa-tive Medicine’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 36(4): 317–40.Dewhurst, K. (1963) John Locke, 1632–1704, Physician and Philosopher; a medicalbiography, with an edition of the medical notes in his journals. London: WellcomeHistorical Medical Library.Foisneau, L. (2001) Hobbes et la toute puissance de Dieu. Paris: Presses Universi-taires de France.Forset, E. (1606) A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique,Wherein Out of the Principles of Nature, is set forth the true forme of a Common-weale . . . London: Printed for John Bill.Foucault, M. (1980) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. R. Hurley. New York:Vintage.Foucault, M. (1997) ‘Society Must Be Defended’, trans. D. Macey. New York: Picador.Gorham, G. (1994) ‘Mind–Body Dualism and the Harvey–Descartes Controversy’,Journal of the History of Ideas 55(2): 211–34.Guy, J.A. (1982) ‘The Origins of the Petition of Right Reconsidered’, The Histori-cal Journal 25(2): 289–312.Hale, D. (1971) The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance EnglishLiterature. The Hague: Mouton.


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Noonan, H. (1998) ‘Animalism versus Lockeanism: A Current Controversy’, Philo-sophical Quarterly 48(192): 302–18.Nutting, H.A. (1960) ‘The Most Wholesome Law – The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679’,American Historical Review 65(3): 527–43.Paine, T. (1791) The Rights of Man, URL (consulted 26 January 2007): http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1776–1800/paine/ROM/rofm04.htmPoovey, M. (2002) ‘The Liberal Civil Subject and the Social in Eighteenth-centuryEnglish Moral Philosophy’, Public Culture 14(1): 125–45.Reeve, L.J. (1986) ‘The Legal Status of the Petition of Right’, The Historical Journal29(2): 257–77.Romanell, P. (1984) John Locke and Medicine: A New Key to Locke. Buffalo, NY:Prometheus Books.Sagan, D. (1992) ‘Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity’, in J. Crary and S. Kwinter(eds) Incorporations. New York: Zone.Shapin, S. (2000) ‘Descartes the Doctor: Rationalism and its Therapies’, BritishJournal for the History of Science 33(2): 131–54.Shapin, S. and S. Schaffer (1985) Leviathan and the Air-pump. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.Sharpe, R.J. (1989) The Law of Habeas Corpus, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Simondon, G. (1992) ‘The Genesis of the Individual’, pp. 297–319 in J. Crary andS. Kwinter (eds) Incorporations. New York: Zone.Springborg, P. (1975) ‘Leviathan and the Problem of Ecclesiastical Authority’,Political Theory 3(3): 289–303.Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press.Vidal, F. (2002) ‘Brains, Bodies, Selves, and Science: Anthropologies of Identityand the Resurrection of the Body’, Critical Inquiry 28(4): 930–47.Virno, P. (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of ContemporaryForms of Life, trans. I. Bertoletti et al. New York: Semiotext(e).Yolton, J. (2001) ‘Locke’s Man’, Journal of the History of Ideas 62(4): 665–83.

Ed Cohen teaches Cultural Studies and directs the PhD in Women’s andGender Studies at Rutgers University. His new book A Body Worth Defend-ing: ‘Immunity’, Biopolitics and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body will bepublished by Duke University Press next year.


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